It is once again a season for Americans to fall in love with Abraham Lincoln, thanks this time to the cinematic brilliance of Steven Spielberg and our tendency to notice historical events upon round-numbered anniversaries, this being the 150th year since the Emancipation Proclamation.

So there are new Lincoln books and Lincoln-related museum shows, talk about Lincoln on TV, a resurgence of interest in Ken Burns' monumental documentary about the Civil War and, of course, there are newspaper columns about Lincoln. To that latter point, who am I to turn a blind eye to a trend?

What seems to attract a lot of columnists is Spielberg's depiction of Lincoln as a hard-driving, pragmatic politician, a guy known in his own time more for his cunning than his courage. This comforts us, in a way, because we can see from the distance of a century and a half that he was in fact a great man, that the flaws his political opponents seized upon were naught compared to the steady nerve and compassionate core that he brought to no less a task than saving American democracy from the poison of slavery. And if a flawed man can emerge as a great figure, the thinking goes, then even among today's often dishonored politicians there are people future generations will revere. So we're comforted.

David Brooks of The New York Times, for one, sees great leaders as willing to diminish themselves in pursuit of a common good, making side deals with their own ideals, because politics is an art of the possible. Lincoln, he says, shows that to accomplish something through politics, you may "bamboozle, trim, compromise and be slippery and hypocritical." From such pursuits emerged The Great Emancipator.

Which brings us to Andrew Cuomo. Not that I'm accusing the governor of those enumerated sins, ennobling as Brooks may consider them, nor that we expect Cuomo to compare favorably with the man who managed the nation through its greatest crisis and emerged as arguably our greatest president. It's just intriguing to look at a capable 21st-century politician in the context of the 19th-century ideal.

Cuomo's skill is that he acquires and spends political capital the way a smart investment banker handles money. A politician gains capital by doing things people like — say, winning a tax cap, or making a government function smoothly — and then invests that capital in ways that will pay off in policy and political success in the long run.

Cuomo's best investment undeniably was his fight to win marriage rights for gay New Yorkers, which he could do in no small part because his capital was high after the tax cap victory. Harold Holzer, the Lincoln scholar who is a friend of the governor and worked for his father, notes that Cuomo faced a recalcitrant Legislature that had rejected gay marriage before, just as Lincoln confronted a U.S. House that had blocked the 13th Amendment barring slavery.

"Lincoln was able to twist arms, unrestrained by laws or ethics committees," notes Holzer, who was an adviser to Spielberg's movie and wrote an accompanying book for young readers. He suggests Lincoln not only traded public-sector jobs for anti-slavery votes, but gave up regulation of railroads in New Jersey for a promise by two congressmen from that state to disappear rather than vote against the 13th Amendment. Cuomo could only quietly offer to help any Republican senator who would back gay marriage.

Lincoln was said to view Albany and New York City as the two toughest places in America to get anything done. When he visited Albany as president-elect, Holzer says, legislators boycotted a dinner the governor had planned, leaving the two men to dine alone.

So much for three men in a room, the formula typically cited as the way decisions are made in Albany. At least Cuomo can get the legislative leaders to show up when he's in town.

But at the time of Lincoln's death a little more than four years later, a president triumphant in war and striding the moral high ground he won by eliminating American slavery had acquired so much political capital that it is still returning adulation today.

The difference between Lincoln and his type on the one hand and ordinary politicians on the other is that great leaders don't crave political capital for their own benefit, but so they can spend it in pursuit of a greater good. And that usually can be seen only later, when our view has been lifted above the daily fight. From the remove of a century and a half, the corners Lincoln cut and deals he struck seem to be earmarks not of cynicism, but of statesmanship.